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This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Tanay Mazumdar, Anurag Gupta
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 192 | Number 2 | November 2018 | Pages 153-188
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1499340
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In our earlier work, a computer code based on Method of Characteristics (MOC) was developed to solve the neutron transport equation for mainly assembly-level lattice calculations with reflective and periodic boundary conditions and to some extent core-level calculation with a vacuum boundary condition. Performance of the MOC code was also demonstrated with flat and linear flux approximations. Since neutron transport calculations involve extensive computation, an attempt is made to develop an efficient numerical recipe that will reduce the computation time. First, a conventional MOC solution of the neutron transport equation is transformed into a matrix equation to apply the Krylov subspace iteration method for accelerating the solution. It is found that even in the most sophisticated and compact formats, forming the matrix equation explicitly by storing its nonzero elements requires extremely large computer memory. Hence, an alternate way to apply the Krylov iteration is demonstrated by incorporating the effect of the matrix-based approach into the solution without storing the matrix elements. This computationally viable and novel acceleration technique is used in combination with the existing formalism of flat as well as linear flux approximation to solve a number of benchmark problems. Results show significant improvement in terms of faster convergence of the solution over the conventional inner-outer iteration without compromising accuracy.